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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976, they couldn't be trusted to run the company.

So, Mike Markkula, Apple's first backer, and the man that guided the company early on, brought in a CEO to do the adult things needed to keep a company running.

His choice for CEO was Michael Scott, who had previously worked with him at Fairchild.

In the course of our reporting about the first ten Apple employees, we managed to get Scott on the phone. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

Business Insider: You were employee number seven when you came into Apple, right?

Michael Scott: No, because I assigned the employee numbers. I was employee number seven, because I wanted number seven. I was actually employee number five at that time. So I was 007, of course, as a joke.

BI: What was it like when you came into the company? You were recruited by Mike Markkula, Apple's first investor, right?

MS: Markkula and I go way back. We both started in 1967-68, I think. We started the same day at Fairchild. He wanted the nickname "Mike," so I got the nickname "Scotty." Coincidentally, we also have the same birthday, except he's a year and a day older. We worked together at Fairchild for five years, he went on to Intel and I went on to National Semiconductor. We always stayed in touch because we had lunch on our birthday. So he called me, I guess in 1976, and said that he'd met these two guys that wanted to do a home computer. He could handle the marketing, but he wanted me to handle the details. So I met with him and the two Steves and read the business plan, which was quite wrong because it said TI was going to be our major competitor. And for some reason, they never got into the PC business.

BI: What were your impressions on meeting the two Steves?

MS: I never got to see the garage, I just saw it at Markkula's place up on a hill. Jobs did the talking, and Woz was the quiet one, although more lately Woz has found his voice more. In the early days, we were all so busy, that it was well partitioned over who did what. Woz was doing circuit board itself, Jobs was handling rest of Apple II, Markkula was working on marketing, and I was working on getting us into the manufacturing and all the rest of the business parts.

The story that's untold is that Rod Holt was brought in as product engineer and there were several flaws in Apple II that were never publicized. One thing Holt has to his credit is that he created the switching power supply that allowed us to do a very lightweight computer compared to everybody else's that used transformers. We used high-speed switching vs. the classical transformer, so we were able to get the weight down. But within their first Apple II, when we tried running it warm like you would in Florida or someplace like that, it stopped working. So that was a secret at the time. How do you get it to work all the time? We kept that a trade secret. That was Holt that found that out. If you stuck in a scope probe to try and figure out what was wrong, it started working again, which was very frustrating, and we were against a time schedule to get into production and we had to freeze the circuit board.

So the other problem we had was where the case itself, which used structural foam, because we couldn't afford the lead time to do hard tooling. We had a lot of trouble with the case when we molded it, it would warp and wouldn't hold its shape.

That's one of the things I still remember. In the spring of 1977, Jobs had this Falcon pickup truck, which I don't think is made anymore. So we'd run off to the molding shop to see what was needed in order to get us cases fast enough.

You're only taking the first ten employees, so by June of 1977, we were at 10. In May, at the first computer fair, we were at 7. So by August of that year we had positive cash flow and were on our way.